"I register four yes votes, two negatives, and one abstention," said the Consul. "The ayes have it. Who wants to start?"----- (pages 22-23)

Hyperion is a frustrating novel. It's written by the author of several excellent sci-fi/fantasy novels. Simmons's Drood is a massive, magnificent tome of creepy historical suspense, and his Ilium/Olympos duology is one of my favorite works of science fiction (although I'm admittedly not a huge fan of the genre). Simmons is fully capable of writing a really good sci-fi novel, but Hyperion is alternately boring and arresting, saddled with an awkwardly utilized literary device, a novel's that kind of coming apart at the seams. There's a lot of things that I really liked about the book, a lot of elements that really work well. And then there were a lot of parts that had me yawning.

The novel is set thousands of years after the death of Earth. The human race has formed a vast society called the Hegemony, spanning thousands of planets and dozens of solar systems. A highly evolved group of artificial intelligences called the TechnoCore aids the Hegemony in its quest to expand its borders by installing farcasters (big teleportation devices, essentially) on non-Hegemony worlds. When Hyperion begins, a group of evolved humans called the Ousters are preparing for an all-out assault on the independent planet of Hyperion. Hyperion is home to the world's greatest mystery: the Time Tombs, strange, ancient structures that appear to be moving backwards in time. The Time Tombs are guarded by the Shrike, a deadly, omnipotent creature that some see as a god, others as a serial killer and others as an avenging angel.
Phew. Everybody with me so far?

At the beginning of the Ousters' attack on Hyperion, seven pilgrims (a detective, a priest, a soldier, a political official, a scholar, a poet and a Templar tree-worshipper) set out on a journey to see the Shrike and demand something from it. Each one tells their story throughout their trip, with the book ending just as they reach the Valley of the Time Tombs, with an interstellar war of massive proportions looming.

Simmons is not an author to scrimp on scope, that's for sure. For a medium-length book (450+ pages) Hyperion covers the stories of six main characters--some of whom have other people's stories embedded within their own--and establishes a hugely complicated fictional universe with a long backstory. Oh, hey, and throw in a galactic apocalypse while you're at it, as well as Simmons's customary literary metatextual references. Dan Simmons is the only author I know of for whom the inclusion of a cyborg version of John Keats is typical. Simmons is at his best when he's creating wild fusions of science-fiction and Greek poetry, or rewriting Shakespeare characters as genetic mutants or AIs. Given the right story, Simmons can wreak merry havoc with the reader, spinning out his trademark insanity with an exhilarating freshness and originality.

Like many writers, however, Simmons has an Achilles heel: characters. What he does best are plot-driven books where the character arcs are basic and simple (yes, Drood is something of an exception to this rule). Hyperion plays right into his weaknesses as a writer because so much of the book relies on the framing device of the characters' backgrounds. For a device like this to work, the character arcs need to be surprising, well-told and relevant to the larger story. Instead, the individual stories vary widely in quality from moving and suspenseful to just plain boring. While the six protagonists are certainly a quirky bunch at first glance, they turn out to be pretty flat as the book progresses. None of them are wildly different than they seem from their first appearance. Simmons is clearly having fun with Martin Silenus, the ancient, foul-mouthed poet whose abrasive personality puts him in conflict with the other pilgrims. Silenus is kind of entertaining at first, and his grandiose narration makes his story rather amusing, but his shtick wears off quickly, especially when it becomes apparent that he doesn't have any depth. Comic relief characters work the best when they're more than flat joke machines.

Other than Silenus, the main characters are certainly a grim bunch. They all have predictably painful backstories, which are kind of boring, for the most part. Father Hoyt's story isn't really his own--most of it is taken from the diary of his mentor, a disgraced priest who encounters a bizarre tribe of natives in Hyperion's flame forest. It's an intriguing, if overlong, interlude, and will no doubt have importance to the series's endgame, but it does nothing to illuminate Hoyt's character. Kassad's story is superficially interesting, and there are some extremely cool scenes (the simulation of the Battle of Agincourt, the fight with the Ousters aboard the destroyed medical spinship), but again, the emotional through-line is lacking. I suppose I feel bad that the love of his life is an evil, metal-toothed harpy, but his character remains thoroughly one-dimensional.

Brawne Lamia, the hardboiled detective of the group, is another character with an intriguing, unsatisfying storyline. The sci-fi-noir gimmick is clever at first, but Simmons isn't good enough at the voice to keep it from getting old. Brawne herself is kind of an irritating character, and her love affair with the John Keats cybrid doesn't do a whole lot for me, emotionally. Dan Simmons, I'm sorry, but you can't write an effective romance to save your life. I did enjoy some of the nutty concepts and ideas in Brawne's story--the gun battle in the multi-level complex was really something--but I didn't really care. The relationship between Brawne and Johnny was rote, and the mystery was not very mysterious (or fair), since it takes place in a science-fiction universe with rules that readers don't necessarily understand.

The best storyline in the book is probably the tale of Sol Weintraub and his daughter. Rachel Weintraub, a bright, vivacious archaeologist, was touched by the Shrike during an expedition to Hyperion. She contracts a strange disease from the monster: she ages backward, one day at a time, her memory erasing itself and her body regressing. Sol's desperate quest to save his daughter is probably the only emotional beat in the novel that Simmons absolutely nails. The concept of someone aging backward is not new, but the heartbreaking way that Rachel slowly loses her identity feels fresh, and it's portrayed with surprising sensitivity. It probably says a lot that the most successful backstory is the one with the least to do with the main plot of the novel. Sol probably has the least to do of all the characters in the present, but it's his story that really resonates.

The final backstory is the most unusual. It's the story of the Consul, the mystery man who is basically the novel's de facto protagonist. The first part of his narrative is the story of his grandfather, a man caught in a romance with a woman's who aging much faster than he is (yeah, this plotline basically reads like an amalgam of the other stories in the book). The whole interlude was actually published as a standalone short story prior to the writing of Hyperion, and it shows. It's not exactly a bad story: the concepts are solid and Simmons's imagination is, as always, fascinating to see at work, but once again, the emotional backbone is lacking. It's also too long, considering its level of relevance to the larger arc of the novel and its position at the very end of the book. A dicursion of that length might have been acceptable closer to the beginning; at the end, it's just a momentum-killer.

Then we get the whammy: the Consul tells his own story, and many separate threads from throughout the book are bound up together in one fell swoop. This is the kind of thing at which Simmons excels: an epic rug-pull that completely shakes up the story. I have to say, for all that I sort of dragged my feet through the novel's weaker spots, Simmons does justify the disparity of the book's many plotlines by tying them all up at the conclusion. It's the best kind of ending for a first book: an ending that feels like a beginning. A truly enormous stage has been set for Book Two, with several mysteries resolved, and many more still hanging.

I still can't call Hyperion a true success. There's too much sci-fi gobbledygook (for my taste anyway) and characters that aren't deep enough to be the leads in a series this immense. For a science-fiction epic of this scope to be really excellent, there needs to be at least a couple of characters worth rooting for, or against. Hyperion's characters have not yet proved themselves to be compelling protagonists, nor has the Shrike really done anything extremely terrifying. I enjoyed all the book's spectacle and its wild ideas, but the stakes don't seem very high. Hopefully, the second book will get rid of the tiresome flashback structure, bone up the character development and fulfill the first book's promise of heady space opera.

1 comment:

After hearing all the praise this book has received I eagerly picked it up. However, I'm about half way through and am finding it quite boring. I think you've articulated exactly why. I skipped parts of your review as not to spoil the plot but I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this one. The premise alone isn't getting me through.